PIECES OF YOU

Wise, tough, heart-breaking, funny, this compulsive love story is about facing your demons.

When fifteen-year-old Rebecca McQuilten moves with her parents to a new city, her life falls apart. Sexually assaulted after a party, a lonely Rebecca finds herself cut adrift from friends and family; and drawn to self-harm.
Things look up when she meets gregarious sixteen-year-old Cory Marshall. Drawn to each other by a love of literature, they meet in Cory’s back yard tree house – and fall in love.
Cory persuades Rebecca to stop cutting herself, but she’s too afraid to confide in him about the assault – especially as the perpetrator, Andy, is in Cory’s sport team.
Cory’s own emotional life is increasingly volatile. Secure in the love of the family who adopted him at birth, his eventual meeting with his birth mother sends him into a tailspin.
Fighting his own demons and withdrawing from Rebecca, Cory suffers a shocking accident. Rebecca, left to pick up the pieces of her shattered life, must confront her own demons, come to terms with her anger and grief, and discover an inner strength she didn’t know
she had.

EILEEN MERRIMAN has won awards for her flash action and adult short stories and this is her first work for young adult readers. Her writing has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Smokelong Quarterly, The Island Review, Literary Orphans, the 2015 Bath Short Story Anthology, the Sunday Star- Times, F(r)iction, Takahe, Headland and Flash Frontier.